Date: 25/01/2011

Altera rolls 28nm FPGAs; Arria V, Stratix V, Cyclone V and also HardCopy V

Altera heats up the 28nm FPGA market by unveiling a new portfolio of 28-nm Cyclone V, Arria V, and Stratix V FPGA and HardCopy V ASIC families. Both Xilinx and Altera get their chips fabricated at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC). So manufacturing process wise not much business differentiators between Xilinx and Altera 28 nm FPGAs.

Altera is trying to differentiate its product by applications, by tuning the FPGA chips for bandwidth and power consumption as per customers requirement. However not much difference noticed between Altera and Xilinx 28nm offerings. If developers are already using Altera chips, they can explore the 28nm offering from Altera without changing the vendor.

Some of the product highlights include:

Altera's 28-nm devices support transceiver speeds from 600 Mbps to 28 Gbps.
On-chip memories are optimized for performance and efficiency and hard and soft memory controllers are provided as per the requirements.
hard IPs such as PCI Express (PCIe) Gen2 x1 and x4, PCIe Gen3 x8, Interlaken, 40G/100G and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) are provided.

"Altera recognizes that every design is unique and customers are looking for solutions that deliver the right set of features and performance levels that meet their specific needs and still offer the ability to differentiate," said Vince Hu, vice president, product and corporate marketing at Altera. "With its 28-nm portfolio, Altera is leveraging its ongoing investment in key areas, such as transceiver design, system-level IP, design tools, and process optimization with TSMC, to create the industry's broadest set of solutions."

Editorial Product Rating: ** (Average Plus)